-
Rosalía & Raül Refree
Rosalía sang flamenco Friday night at Joe’s Pub. She has height, and lankiness, and long expressive fingers, and a perpetually sensitive face, hot with emotion and soft with a kind of yearning. The air seems strung with filaments when she sings, quivering above, behind, and before her, and her tremulous lips part from time to…
-
Nella
Hearing the young Venezuelan singer Nella in real space for the first time felt like stumbling upon a new species. I wanted to collect specimens, come to understand it, preserve it. To the songs she sang from Spain and Venezuela she gave something familiar but utterly distinct, an Ibero-American sound completely her own, effuse with…
-
Makbet
The Theatre Group Dzieci is a Grotowski-inspired art and service collective that has lived for a decade with Shakespeare’s Scottish play and is only now presenting it, as MAKBET, in a theatrical run. They charge you nothing to see it, but pay the hat (you should) and accept from them a “piece of paper” that…
-
Antigona
Noche Flamenca’s ANTIGONA presents Sophocles’ tragedy using the conventions of flamenco dance, music and song. It connects the original theme, of a sister seeking to bury a disgraced brother against the dictates of the city state of Thebes, with recent efforts to exhume, identify and respectfully re-inter victims of the Franco regime in Spain. In…
-
Flamencos y mestizos: Lara Bello
I would no more call what Lara Bello does “fusion” than I would the diverse flowers of a meadow seeded by the winds. The flora of her landscape seem to have landed there quite naturally and grown at their own pace. Flamenco, jazz, and folk, the genres of North Africa, the Near East, Asia, Iberia,…
-
Granada
There is something in Sílvia Pérez Cruz’s voice so pure that it makes you lose your mind. You wonder where it possibly can be coming from, for it seems a thing of nature, but utterly unique, a plant never before seen, yet born organically. There ought to be many of them, but there is only…
-
Havana Rakatan
After the intermission, HAVANA RAKATAN moves inside, from the streets and waterfront locations evoked in the first act to a scenography of nightclubs and theatrical shows. It seems, suddenly and counter-intuitively, more authentic than it did before. Colorfully dressed farmers and urban workers, dancing in celebration of weddings, harvests, fiestas, might seem, on the surface,…
-
Sílvia Pérez Cruz
I had planned, upon hearing Sílvia Pérez Cruz sing at Joe’s Pub, to make my way to another event involving music. But the idea of altering the state in which she, and the guitarist Raül Fernández Miró, had left me was practically unthinkable; the tenor of the experience deserved, as the profoundest of our aesthetic…
-
Este nuestro espacio
The lovely little play that I saw on Saturday night began with the Spanish singer Lara Bello, dimly visible, evoking a lost bohemia from behind a diaphonous scrim, accompanied by the pianist Shai Bachar. It is almost a cameo to look at now, like something contained in a locket of long ago, from someplace in…
-
Lara Bello
The Spanish singer Lara Bello is one of the more inventive artists I have encountered in New York. Her album Niña Pez was an amalgam of jazz, singer-songwriter folk, flamenco, alternative rock and Middle Eastern vocals. In the title figure she created a sort of alter ego for her own persona. Bello is a storyteller,…